Beyond the Immobility of “Museum Pieces”: Variations on Mobility in the Collections of a Museum of Geography

The expression “museum piece” is often linked to the words “old”, “outdated”, “forgotten”, “dusty” and, above all, “static”. However, organising the collections of a museum leads to continually building itineraries, challenging the immobility of objects. The paper intends to employ the concept of mobility as a heuristic investigation perspective on the collections of the Geography Museum of the University of Padua. This is an approach that is particularly promising in light of both the academic nature of the collection considered (connected to the construction and transmission of academic knowledge) and its geographic nature (it participates in the mobility of a discipline that involves places distributed on the surface of our planet).